Those who know 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof, the man arrested and charged with killing nine people in a historic African-American church, have described him as “smart,” “wild,” “sweet” and “quiet,” but he was also known to make racist comments.

Witnesses say the suspect sat in on a prayer meeting at Emanuel
African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina
for an entire hour on Wednesday before he began shooting. Roof
used a semiautomatic pistol, law enforcement officials said,
according to the Washington Post. Three men and six women were
killed, while three victims survived.

The cousin of one of the deceased told WIS that she spoke with a
survivor who told her that the gunman reloaded five times. He
walked up to each victim and took precise aim, rather than
spraying gunfire from the back of Emmanuel AME Church, officials
said.

“He just said, ‘I have to do it.’ He said, ‘You rape our
women, and you’re taking over our country. And you have to
go,’” said Sylvia Johnson, a cousin of the Reverend Clementa
Pinckney, one of the deceased victims.

The president of the Charleston NAACP, Dot Scott, said the gunman
told one survivor he would let her live so that she could tell
others what had happened in the church, the Charleston Post and
Courier reported.

Roof’s father gave him a .45-caliber pistol for his birthday in
April, Carson Cowles, the suspect’s uncle told Reuters.

“Nobody in my family had seen anything like this
coming,” Cowles said shortly before Roof was arrested.
“If it is him, and when they catch him, he’s got to pay for
this.”

Arrest records indicate that Roof was detained on charges of
felony drug possession in March and misdemeanor trespassing in
April of this year. He had no prior criminal record.

The trespassing charge was related to a February incident in
which employees at a mall store in Columbia, South Carolina
complained about Roof, who was wearing all black and asked
“out of the ordinary questions,” CBS News reported. An
officer searched Roof and found “orange strips” that
Roof said were “suboxone,” a Schedule 3 narcotic. Roof
was arrested and banned from the mall for a year, but returned in
April.

Suboxone is a drug used to treat opioid dependence. According to
the US Food and Drug Administration, one side effect of the
medicine is mood swings. It has been connected with sudden
outbursts of aggression, InfoWars said.

Roof lived in Lexington, South Carolina, about 120 miles
northwest of Charleston, where he had attended White Knoll High
School for less than two years. He failed his first year at the
school, and then left halfway through his second attempt, the
local school district told Reuters. Roof then went to Dreher High
School for several months before leaving in 2010.

But Roof’s roommate of less than a year told AP that the suspect
had been “planning something like that for six months.”

“He was big into segregation and other stuff,” Dalton
Tyler said. “He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said
he was going to do something like that and then kill
himself.”

The mother of one of Roof’s childhood friends told AP that she
didn’t know why he was in Charleston and that she was not aware
of his being involved in any church groups or saying anything
racist, but that he displayed a Confederate flag on his front
license plate.

“I don’t know what was going through his head,” Kimberly
Konzny said. “He was a really sweet kid. He was quiet. He
only had a few friends.”

Her son, Joey Meek, alerted the FBI after seeing the widely
circulated surveillance camera images of the suspect. Meek and
Konzny immediately recognized Roof in the photos, wearing the
same stained sweatshirt he had worn while playing Xbox video
games at their home on Tuesday, Konzny said.

Meek told AP he didn’t think twice about picking up the phone and
calling authorities.

“I didn’t THINK it was him. I KNEW it was him,” he said.

Roof reportedly had made remarks about the killing of unarmed
black 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida and the riots in
Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray in police custody.

“He said blacks were taking over the world. Someone needed to
do something about it for the white race,” Meek said.
“He said he wanted segregation between whites and blacks. I
said, ‘That’s not the way it should be.’ But he kept talking
about it.”

Roof had a reputation for spouting racist messages in high
school, Mullins said.

“I never heard him say anything, but just he had that kind of
Southern pride, I guess some would say. Strong conservative
beliefs,” he said. “He made a lot of racist jokes, but
you don’t really take them seriously like that. You don’t really
think of it like that.”

But now, “the things he said were kind of not joking,”
Mullins added.

A Facebook photo shows Roof wearing a jacket with two flag
patches: one of Apartheid-era South Africa, and the other of
Rhodesia, a white-dominated country that became
majority-black-ruled Zimbabwe.

Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, told
AP that Roof was not known to his group ‒ which tracks the
activities of hate groups and domestic terrorists across the US ‒
but that, based on Roof’s Facebook page, the 21-year-old appeared
to be a “disaffected white supremacist.”

In a statement, Cohen said the mass murder is “an obvious
hate crime by someone who feels threatened by our country’s
changing demographics and the increasing prominence of African
Americans in public life.”